The Collapse of Michigan Football

Happy and dedicated U of M football fans

Being students at the University of Michigan, we all realize how important out football team is to the overall school, and how much money the school makes by having a successful program. In order to achieve this goal of a successful football program, our athletic department often pays schools, such as Appalachian State, with football programs in the lower-teir FCS conference (as apposed to the higher-teir FBS that Michigan and other Big 10 teams are in) up to one million dollars just to play our team. Our athletics program does this in the sole hope that the game against these types of teams will serve as an opportunity to boost fan morale and player confidence. Additionally, a blowout win (no matter who we are playing) will make boosters (people that add funds to the football program) extremely happy, and they in turn will give the athletics program at Michigan even more money!

We pay teams so that we can blow them out, and they make more money by doing so!

In playing sub-par teams such as Appalachian State, Michigan was originally following the belief learned from Thucydides “Melian Dialogue” in the “History of the Peloponnesian War“ that, “the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.”

What the Michigan football team looks like to Appalachian State

They were therefore acting as the Athenians who did not really have any need to attack the Melians, but were simply doing so to make themselves look stronger.

However, the football team’s current state of play, with multiple bad losses coming to notoriously sub-par football programs such as Utah and Minnesota, and the first shutout in thirty years coming in a loss to rival Notre Dame, has made it seem that Michigan is not the superpower that it seems to be, and is actually one of weakest teams in the Big 10 Conference. As a result of these bad losses, the football program at Michigan has begun to lose a ton of money. Being a student, I can admit to the fact that I often want to leave games at halftime, and I am not the only one who wants to do so.

The feeling of disbelief and disgust that Michigan fans are feeling right now

Just this past weekend in our match against Minnesota for the coveted “Brown Jug,” Michigan lost by a score of thirty to fourteen. As as result of the team’s poor play, the game against Minnesota was one of the worst attended games of all time at The Big House. Working off of a comment written by “bpolan” on my original post of this blog, the students lack of attendance plays into the theories written in Bart Giamatti’s book, “Take Time for Paradise”. Football fans, and sports fans in general, attend games in order to achieve a divine and immortal feeling as Giamatti explains. However, with the team’s lackluster play so far this season, Michigan football games have become meaningless and boring for fans. That is why by the time the fourth quarter of the Minnesota game rolled around, and the broadcasting crews zoomed in on the student section, almost three quarters of the students who had been there to start the game had already left.

As of now our football program simply seems to be one that pays sub-par teams to make the Wolverines look better, despite that we are realistically a terrible team that has lost the attention of its fans. Clearly, Michigan has a very far way to go if they ever want to get back to being the powerhouse team that they once were, with the great fans that they once had.

The good ole’ days of Michigan football